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How Network Analytics Can Help You Make Better Decisions

Analytics holds great promise for enterprises looking to harness Big Data in their operations to understand key metrics and make better business decisions. Network performance management introduces a wealth of data about the health and performance of business communications networks. If you do it right, you can use network analytics to turn your data into a powerful business asset.

Managing performance in the cloud

A survey by RightScale on the State of the Cloud 2016, found that 95 percent of organizations are using some form of cloud for business operations, a number up from 93 percent in 2015. IT departments are moving all sorts of functions, including hosted communications, to the cloud to increase efficiency, lower operating costs and optimize IT resources. (When it comes to business communications, one out of every four cloud communication users chooses Mitel.) Depending on how you deploy it, moving to the cloud can increase network complexity and present a performance management challenge for service providers.

Meeting changing user expectations

Today’s user expects high reliability and service quality. Enterprises that can deliver on those demands see improved performance and increased user satisfaction while service providers that can deliver on those demands see less churn and healthy contract renewal rates. That’s why performance management and analytics are now a strategic requirement for business communications success. Ideally, companies supporting networks need tools that not only detect and address problems like poor voice quality—but also deliver useful data on the network’s performance over time. For companies supporting Mitel networks, Mitel Performance Analytics does just that.

Analytics: from Reactive to Proactive

Analytics help enterprises and service providers answer key questions about service quality to proactively plan, predict and act:

Is the user’s service quality getting better or worse?

What’s the user’s perception of service quality vs. actual service quality?

Which services are being used the most/least?

What are the biggest problems happening on my network right now?

An optimal network analytics solution proactively monitors your business communications network around the clock, including multi-vendor routers, switches and servers. It also alerts channel partners and IT staff when problems are detected, so that they can be addressed before the user is impacted. Taking proactive network management one step further, analytics can leverage the data collected to plan, predict and forecast. For Mitel users, all of these functions are conveniently bundled up into Mitel Performance Analytics.

The potential of network performance analytics

The Alarm Analytics designed into Mitel’s fault and performance management solution is a great example of how to build a detailed repository of network behavior. On a large network, thousands of alarms are generated by monitored devices each day, some useful and others innocuous. If you have too much data, you become ‘inoculated’ and stop looking.

Alarm analytics allows the system to learn which alarms are most important to you based on your behavior with a rating system. Ignore it? It gets a lower rating. Assign it? The system learns this kind of alarm is important to you. Mitel Performance Analytics considers your behavior, as well as what others on the system do with the alarm. The outcome? The information that’s most important to you is now front and center, making it easier and faster to deal with pressing problems.

Maximizing Big Data

Usage analytics hold similar promise when it comes to making better use of Big Data from Mitel networks. Full adoption is the goal when companies deploy new Mitel services, and Mitel Performance Analytics can help. Which services and platforms are your users working with on a daily basis? Which services are used less? Is there a performance problem that might be preventing full user adoption? In the future, Mitel Performance Analytics will provide these answers. The result? Higher adoption rates and in turn, satisfied users and customers.

Stay tuned as Analytics is introduced in Release 2.1 of Mitel Performance Analytics. See what’s in the current release >